Foster Care Transformation and Optimization

Ensuring patients receive high-quality and continuous care that keeps up with new technologies is essential for better health outcomes. The ACC suggests several actions to help achieve this goal:

  • Simplify electronic prior authorization processes to reduce patient care delays.
  • Make telehealth services more accessible by maintaining flexibilities made available during the pandemic.
  • Create incentives that work across different specialties and health care providers.
  • Encourage innovative approaches to care delivery through effective ambulatory and virtual specialty care and support the balanced regulation of artificial intelligence technologies.

ACC in Action

  • The College is an active member of the Regulatory Relief Coalition, working with partner cardiovascular societies and other stakeholders to advance solutions to prior authorization and other administrative burdens.
  • Sweeping grassroots support from ACC members ushered in a significant victory when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule in early 2024, tightening timelines, increasing transparency and streamlining electronic prior authorization requests.
  • Congress extended telehealth flexibilities through Sept. 30 after ACC members sent nearly 1,500 messages to their lawmakers.
  • The ACC underscored the importance of securing personal information while enabling data-driven innovation and care improvement when responding to a request for information from the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee.

Policy Progress

  • The Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act garnered majority bipartisan support last Congress. It would make permanent the regulatory action taken by CMS in the Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule.
  • The Sustainable Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation Services in the Home Act (H.R. 783) would allow the furnishing of cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation services via telehealth at a patient’s home under Medicare.
  • The Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act (S. 1261) has been introduced in Congress, which aims to implement permanent telehealth flexibilities.
  • Congress reintroduced the Reducing Medically Unnecessary Delays in Care Act (H.R. 2433), which would require all prior authorization and adverse determinations be made by a board-certified physician in the same specialty as the ordering clinician.
  • Prior authorization bills continue to make headway in several states, passing in Virginia, Indiana and North Dakota.

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